The interior of a building is terra incognita to soldiers during urban combat. Blueprints of the building are rarely available, and currently the only way to generate a map of a building is for the soldier to draw a map by hand. This process has two major drawbacks. First, the act of drawing a map is a heads-down, two-handed operation, so that the soldier cannot maintain a ready attitude in the event of hostile activity. Second, the resultant map is crude and is often only just a dimensionally inaccurate representation of the interior of the building. As such, analysis of the hand-drawn map is limited, and the map is difficult to share with others. Too often, the knowledge gained by the first team of soldiers to enter a building is completely unavailable to the next group to enter.
For Urban Unattended ground Sensors (U-UGS) when one deploys sensors in a building, the physical layout of the building interior (i.e. the building “blueprint’) is unknown. Thus, there is no good way of knowing the location of where in the building the sensors were deployed, or their context (for example, the area around each of those sensors). When an alarm goes off, sensors in an un-mapped building provide little additional information than a trip-wire system. Security personnel responding to the alarm would not know how to respond to a specific alarm from a specific sensor, because they would not know what room the sensor is in, and how that room relates to other rooms in the building (e.g., what room connect to that room), or whether that room is an interior room or has access from the building exterior via a window or door.
Current solutions for personal navigation are not well suited for mapping buildings. For example, global positioning system (GPS) solutions fail to work reliably inside of buildings because such solutions require a clear line of sight to three or four satellites to achieve the needed resolutions. Inside a building, reliable signals from these satellites are not available.
For the reasons stated above and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the specification, there is a need in the art for improved systems and methods for mapping of a building interior.